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There was something about seeing a man, who tore people apart with his teeth, floss. Nagi watched Farfarello from the bathroom door. He had a look of quiet determination, and Nagi wondered if he really had pieces of human flesh stuck behind his canines. It seemed likely, though Schuldig hadn’t brought him out for a while.
”You look like you never seen a man look after his oral hygiene before.”
”You do know that it’s not supposed to bleed?” It could be the man’s own flesh, now that he thought about it. He saw no bite marks, but there was a ridge of what was probably razorblades tucked beneath the skin of his arm.
Farfarello shrugged. ”It’s not like it won’t heal.” Which was a strangely balanced answer, and in his head, Nagi rewrote it as, ”I like the taste.” He shrugged, realized he was mimicking, and hoped Farfarello was too busy with his teeth to notice. Although, really, he didn’t care. It wasn’t as if the madman’s opinion mattered: if it angered him, Nagi could easily defend himself. He almost hoped for it. Possibly, Crawford would understand. Unlikely, but possible. Nagi calculated the costs and benefits.
”Are you done soon?” It was, narrowly, in favor of not. It always was. It would be satisfactory, but not enough. The all-for-love drama was for Weiß. Weaklings. It wouldn’t get him anywhere. Possibly, one ruined building was enough.
Farfarello cocked his head to grin at him, an effect that was mostly spoiled by the thread of floss hanging from his mouth. ”Eager for your bedtime, li’l one?”
Nagi rolled his eyes. ”There are other people who want to use the bathroom too, you know.” Telling Farfarello he wasn’t a child anymore never helped; in his mind, it didn’t seem to matter.
”Just you, now.”
”Yes, and I would like to brush my teeth. Now.” Schuldig never had these problems, Nagi reflected. He and the crazy seemed to get along - now that the telepath was on the other side of the city, Nagi allowed himself to finish that sentence - like peas in a pod. Stupid saying that. He’d heard it on some TV show, and of course it stuck. Everything stupid did. Stupid American expressions, bad songs, mud on his shoes. Irishmen. The good went away, before you even wrapped your head around it. Sweet laughter and blue eyes. Kisses under trees.
”...say, ’s all yours.”
Nagi blinked. Farfarello stared at him through a narrowed eye.
”Good,” he said, and hoped he sounded like Crawford. Back when.
Farfarello stepped closer, eye locked on him. There was a line of spit and blood on his chin, almost aligning itself with a scar. Nagi waited for Farfarello to step aside, so he could enter the bathroom and Farfarello could exit. It never occurred to him to take a step back.
Instead, a pale, scarred face leaned in towards his, close enough for him to smell mint and blood and dust, an intent look in the lonely amber eye. ”God works in mysterious ways.”
When Farfarello talks of God, it never ends well.
”We must carve out our own path, afore he fucks us over. You can’t leave it to fate, because He rules it. Never hesitate.”
And then he did walk past, arm brushing against Nagi’s.
Nagi thought about it, as he leaned over the sink to look himself in the mirror. Crazy talk, to be expected. Maybe. There was more Crawford than the man who raged at God in those words. Control your destiny. Five years, things were bound to be different.
Japan had no longer been an option; better to let people believe they were dead while they could. They had hauled ass, as Schuldig put it. Moved out, moved on. They were Schwarz, surviving was what they did. Europe had still been full of Rosenkreutz, Eszet, Gifted loyal to the Elders and likely eager for some payback. Who’d have known Eszet was such a hydra? Well, Crawford should have known, but Nagi preferred not to think of that. With their wounds still healing, facing them all hadn’t been an option.
They had tried the US, where Crawford still had contacts. Boston. Soon, the Irish clergy had started to drop dead left and right. The Irish, Nagi had thought, took their religion very seriously, one way or another. He hadn’t said it aloud, because it had been one of those days, but he’d seen Schuldig grin as he thought it. The South was out of the question; little towns with churches on every block and nothing they could use. Schuldig liked the big cities, said they were lively, which meant they covered the noises in his head. Farfarello twitched at everything these days. Nagi thought people were probably universally unpleasant but the technology had been better in Japan. Crawford frowned and pressed his lips together and took them to South America. Nagi tried to see that gleam in the eye of the one person he’d follow, had followed, to the end of the world. It wasn’t there.
He hadn’t even bothered to learn the name of the country they were in - they kept moving anyway, traveling with the conflicts. No one understood the language. He soon learned that ”equal disadvantage” was a bad thing. But green was a dialect everyone spoke, and they got by. There were enough churches to give Farfarello a perpetually manic twitch of the eye, enough people for Schuldig to busy himself, and whatever else there was, Nagi was only interested in the internet connection. Which was nearly fast enough.
They set up shop for the warlords, corrupt politicians, and anyone else who had the funds. They did small jobs they could have pulled off in their sleep. They learned the language, the people, the place. Schuldig said they walked the walk and talked the talk, and even Nagi could hear he was bored. They waited.
Crawford had asked him once, before, if he knew what creative destruction was. ”No,” he had said, sitting quiet as Crawford had folded his hands neatly and told him.
”Schumpeter introduced it as an economic concept in the nineteen-forties.” Because details were important to Crawford, every little one mattered, from the buttons of his shirt to the proverbial butterfly. ”It’s used to describe the process of industrial transformation. As new industries or innovations take hold, the old will be destroyed. Obsolete.” Crawford had smiled tight and sharp as a razor and pushed his glasses up, knowing Nagi would understand.
Was Farfarello thinking about leaving? Was that what he had meant? Nagi spit out the toothpaste foam and considered the idea. Where would the man go, to begin with? He couldn’t imagine Farfarello without Schwarz. He’d imagined Schwarz without Farfarello often enough, and found the idea appealing. Without him, there would have been order. Without him, Tot would have been alive - and how Schuldig had laughed at that one: ”Tot ist tod!” It was never mentioned again. If Nagi had been one to delude himself, he would have liked to think that without Farfarello, they would have won. The shitty thing was, they had won, in a way. And it hadn’t given them anything.
They were moving again. Crawford had looked up as he entered the kitchen that morning, tired-eyed glance that soon went back to the four fingers around his chipped coffee cup, and Nagi had found himself thinking, The king is dead. Crawford had said, ”We’re going to Africa.” He had asked, ”Does Schuldig know?” Crawford had shrugged. ”Probably.” Nagi had nodded and gotten some coffee. There was nothing else to do. Without Farfarello, he sometimes thought, there would have been an alternative, something to fall back on. Someone else to go to.
He imagined himself without Schwarz, and didn’t like what he saw. Same outcast kid with no one to turn to. He’d be stronger now, of course, and smarter. He’d learned to lie, cheat, and manipulate with the best of them - from the best of them. Farfarello didn’t have that. He could murder his way through the Pentagon, but Nagi doubted the man could even buy a bottle of milk on his own. Then again, none of them had had to go out to buy groceries for years, not since Nagi had discovered the home-delivery system.
Schuldig took off into the city, disappearing for days and coming back smelling of alcohol and death. He stayed for shorter and shorter periods. Nagi was almost glad of it, because when Schuldig dreamed these days, they all had nightmares. Crawford came home in the evenings, but no one knew where he went. Farfarello supposedly stayed at home when Schuldig didn’t take him with him, but climbing out a window was kid’s stuff and Nagi could hardly be expected to babysit grown men when there were accounts to hack. So suppose he had someplace to go, some arrangement? Nagi wasn’t sure what he thought about that. Good riddance - but the definite breakdown of Schwarz. Worse, he realized, Farfarello wouldn’t leave on his own. Schuldig would take him with him, and then there would be nearly nothing left. He wondered if Farfarello, in some bizarre fit of sympathy, had tried to tell him to leave, too. He smiled ruefully and shook his head at himself.
And where did that leave him? Would he be forever waiting for someone to come back, hoping they wouldn’t have left for good? No. They wouldn’t. They would come out on top in the end, they always did. It was who they were.
His mirror image didn’t look convinced, and Nagi had to admit it had a point. In only a few years, they had manipulated their way through Eszet, planned and staged a coup d’etat, and very nearly plunged the whole world into chaos. After it all caved in on them, it had taken them five years to get to... this. A small apartment in Fuckall, South America, with nothing to their names. Granted, they didn’t use their names anymore, but still. The king is dead.
He turned off the faucet.
In the livingroom, Farfarello sat curled up on the couch, still half-naked, sucking a candy cane. Halfway across the world, and there were still the damn candy canes. At least they didn’t show It’s a Wonderful Life; that had been a bit of a nightmare. Farfarello looked up from whatever TV-show he was watching as Nagi entered. The man had an uncanny penchant for telenovelas, the sappier the better. Nagi wondered why he had ever hesitated. I could turn you into a smear, and Crawford wouldn’t care. But it was confirmation he didn’t need, like the suicidal who put off killing himself so he could go on believing in Heaven.
”Di’ you know,” Farfarello mouthed around the candy, ”the indians in the Andes believe the pishtaco will behead them and steal their body fat any chance it gets?” No office romance, this, then.
”The what?”
Farfarello took the candy out of his mouth to pronounce the word again. ”Pishtaco.” The end of the cane had been sucked sharp and thin; it looked more like a tiny striped spear than candy. Everything seemed to turn into a weapon in his hands. Or mouth. ”It’s a monster in shape of a white man with a long knife.” Farfarello grinned, eye glowing in the light of the TV, and it reminded Nagi of the old days. ”Maybe I should go west?”
Nagi noted the ”I” and thought of saying, Good idea, good-bye, but said, ”You’re leaving, then?”
Farfarello didn’t answer right away, but looked very serious. Nagi leaned against the doorframe and idly wondered how long it was going to take for his accent to wear down. Five years speaking only Japanese and another five surrounded by Americans and Spanish hadn’t seemed to make a difference at all. It was a problem, because Irish was noticeable. Nagi had gotten his perfect American pronunciation hammered into him - often literally - when he was young, Crawford had seen to that. Schuldig complained that his Japanese was better than his English and refused to speak anything but Spanish these days. Japanese was strictly forbidden, even at home. ”You never know,” Crawford had said.
Nagi thought, No, you never know.
Schuldig said he should get laid, that it would help him get over himself. But people disgusted him. His own touch disgusted him. Schuldig could exert hatred with a caress; Nagi wanted nothing of it. ”It’s a human need,” Schuldig had said, leaning over his shoulder to watch the numbers tick by on the screen to mask the business transactions of their latest client. Nagi didn’t think much of being human.
Because in the end, it might just as well be his fault, this state they had come to. If he’d been stronger, better - older, even... He worked harder now, and when the time came, they wouldn’t need to rely on unstable pawns. It had to come.
On the couch, Farfarello fished something out of his back pocket. It looked like a worn playing card. He held it up in front of his face. ”King of Hearts. Why d’you think he’s sticking a sword through his head?”
Nagi glanced at the TV, where a sparkly-toothed doctor was declaring his undying love to an apparently dying woman in perfect makeup. ”Why do you watch these shows anyway?”
Farfarello threw the card at his face and Nagi caught it by reflex, letting it hang in the air. There was a tear down its middle, parting a stylized mournful-looking man in two.
”For the Suicide King, Victory and Death are the same.”
Nagi had learned long ago to mostly ignore Farfarello’s puzzles; they were a little like nervous ticks. He thought they sounded better in Japanese though - the Irish accent made him sound sort of folksy. Farfarello, salt of the earth. Like a bad tarot reader.
He’d found the horoscope in the morning paper. Nagi didn’t believe in horoscopes, hadn’t then either, but an infinite number of monkeys and all that. He’d quietly passed it to Crawford, who’d smiled and nodded. Something hitherto stable has started to crumble and may come to appear very different soon. In retrospect Nagi thought, We should have known. He still remembered it, because it was so very ironic.
”Whatever. Turn the volume down, will you?” He let the card fall to the floor.
”You don’t sleep anyhow.”
”Not your problem. I thought you were going with Schuldig tonight?”
Farfarello shrugged and nodded towards the screen. ”Look, Mariana is about to find out Jorge is cheating with her sister, who’s actually his lost cousin and married to his father.” Nagi caught a glimpse of a couple snuggling comfortably in a lavish, red-satin bed. It made his own bed all the less appealing. He turned his gaze to watch Farfarello put his bare feet up on the coffee table instead, and wished Crawford was there to have a fit about it. ”I learn about people,” Farfarello explained.
”Right.” Nagi wondered what they were, really, to have to learn about the rest of the world from TV - they who should have ruled it like kings. ”We have the power to call the Devil.” But the Devil hadn’t answered, or had been there all along, breathing down their necks when they thought it was the thrill of the game they felt. He sat down on the arm of the couch.
Farfarello stretched and resumed licking his candy as the telenovela ended and was replaced by news. A woman was describing her neighbour, a man arrested suspected of a series of gruesome murders. ”He was quiet,” the woman on TV said. ”Kept to himself. Strange boy.”
People always talked of criminals in the past tense, as if though they were already dead. Nagi tried to imagine how they would be described. Probably, the police would be faced with the same kind of blank stare the suspect wore. ”Nice boys, couldn’t have been them, they were here helping me move my furniture, look, I made them cookies...” Assuming Schuldig was still around. Speaking of whom...
”I thought Schuldig was supposed to keep an eye on you?”
Farfarello smiled like only Farfarello could; like a fallen angel ready to tear down the sun. It told Nagi everything about the nature of Schuldig’s interference. ”Crawford’s not complaining.”
The sentence was Schuldig’s, too; the German had said almost the exact same words in Boston, when Nagi had tried to reason with him. ”Crawford is in charge, nicht wahr? And he is not saying anything.” Crawford had just shrugged when Nagi talked to him.
In truth, asking Schuldig to look after Farfarello was like setting a hyena to watch the lion.
”You’ll kill us out of another city.”
”D’you have something to stay for?”
Nagi wanted to be able to say, ”Yes.” The truth was, of course, that Fuckall, South America was no better than Fuckall, United States, or Boston. (Boston had had better internet connections.) But he very much wanted to stay in a place long enough to settle in, to catch their breaths. It would give Crawford some time to think, come up with a plan, pull himself together. But Farfarello and Schuldig kept pushing them to leave and every time Nagi hoped for some durance, the body count started to rise. Schuldig wouldn’t listen to this argument either. ”He had five years. What’s he waiting for, a new finger from Santa?” Schuldig should know, Nagi thought, but he wasn’t telling. Whatever went on in Crawford’s head, Schuldig either didn’t care or didn’t share.
Not bothering to wait for a reply, Farfarello asked, ”Why do you stick by Crawford?”
”What?”
”You heard.”
Nagi considered and decided against pointing out the obvious. ”Look, we can’t do anything if we have to keep living like common criminals on the run. Which we have to, as long as you insist on drawing attention to us by leaving messy corpses everywhere.”
”D’you want me to leave?” The question seemed so bluntly honest that Nagi didn’t know what to say.
”So what do they do with the body fat?”
”Sell it to the white industries, to grease the machineries.”
”Metaphorical. If we stay, we can start to build up a new power base. It’s a chaotic region; instead of serving these petty amateurs, we could rule them.”
Farfarello nodded, as if to himself. ”You know there is no plan, right?”
”You don’t know that. You never asked.”
”Schuldig knows.”
”Are you sure he’d tell you?”
Farfarello’s mouth thinned, but he said nothing.
Nagi stared at the TV, and hoped to be done with this conversation. He shouldn’t have to deal with this, it was Schuldig’s job. Crawford set the goal, Schuldig did the conflict management, Farfarello handled the wetwork, and Nagi took care of the background details. That was the way it should be. But Schuldig, reliable, capable Schuldig, seemed to only work for himself now. ”I will not follow the blind,” he’d said with a contemptuous glance at Crawford, and Nagi had held his breath for the hell that never broke loose. Without really wanting to, he leaned back against the couch, closing his eyes.
”Aren’t you sick of going through the same pattern, over and over again, and getting nowhere?” He hadn’t meant to say it, had really meant to stay quiet, but it slipped out anyway. He wasn’t even sure what he meant by it.
”One step at a time and before you know it, you conquer the world.”
He turned his head to look at Farfarello. There was some kind of calm in his face Nagi couldn’t quite define.
”But Crawford’s-”
Farfarello shook his head a fraction, very slowly, and stared intently at him.
”Just you, now.”
Just me.
The King is dead.
He met Farfarello’s eye.
”So what have you learned? About people?”
Darkness and gold burned as Farfarello smiled.
”That they all deserve to die.”
He could work with that.